Social media marketing startup Tiger Pistol raises angel funding

Australian startup with an awesome name, Tiger Pistol has raised $1.15 million in funding. The social media marketing company will cater to business in Asia and the South Pacific.

Tiger Pistol helps businesses beef up their Facebook pages with apps and tab pages. Apps can run contests or sweepstakes, and provide coupons. It also offers analytics to track social marketing successes or failures.

Australian businessman and investor David Solomon provided the angel round. The full press release is below.

Social media marketing now accountable with industry performance benchmarks

May 17, 2012: Australian startup Tiger Pistol today unveiled the first social marketing platform for SMBs, providing a range of ready-made social marketing apps as well as industry-wide performance benchmarks, providing transparency and predictability to the social media marketing industry for the first time.

The Australian company, which will initially focus on the Asia Pacific market, is backed by a $1.15 million angel round led by Australian businessman and investor David Solomon. The Tiger Pistol platform integrates into Facebook and will shortly add Twitter, LinkedIn, Sina Weibo and Kaixin001 in an effort to capture a slice of the estimated $2.5b spent by small businesses on social media marketing each year.

Tiger Pistol released its platform in closed beta in late 2011 and attracted over 1,600 SMB users from 107 countries, as well as larger corporate partners and customers including Expedia, Hotels.com, Twinings The Weather Channel, Village Roadshow, Under Armour, Webjet, The ABC and the BBC.

Stephen Hibberd, Tiger Pistol co-founder and CEO commented: “Brands and SMBs have lacked an understanding of the value a business derives from a fan, so they have just spent money and effort trying to get more. But are they the right ones? And what is their value? Our platform allows them to increasingly understand who’s engaging with them, what value they bring to the business and gives them the insights and tools to continue and grow the engagement in a valuable way.

“We make marketing via social media simple for small businesses, with drag and drop tools that anyone can use, together with enterprise-grade analytics and benchmarking. We think the combination of simplicity and rigor is critical for the sake of the industry as well as the businesses who are spending their hard-earned money and demand a return.”

Young & Rubicam CEO, SE Asia, Sanjay Bhasin, said: “The Tiger Pistol benchmarking and analysis will subject social media marketing to the same scrutiny as all the other marketing channels. This has been the missing link for many companies so we would expect this to add further growth to a market already growing at amazing speeds.”

The Tiger Pistol platform lets SMBs create a series of Tab Pages and Apps designed to attract and engage fans and convert fans to customers. Using templates and drag-and-drop widgets, the Tab Pages and Apps can be created and personalised within minutes in any language.

The benchmarking and analytics component of the Platform provides data on more than 25 elements, including:

Effectiveness: number of participants, reach growth in number of fans, conversion rates